When I first graduated with my journalism degree from Penn State, I landed my first gig as a technical writer for The Vanguard Group in Malvern, PA. At the time, I didn’t even know what technical writing was. Once I learned this extremely useful skill, I have been using it in all of my work since.
Basically, technical writing is documenting a process or procedure in a simple way, making it accessible and easy for the average, non-technical person, to understand.
Types of documents created:
Technical writing can take many forms. The list below includes some of the types of documents I have created over the years:
- Division directives/guidances
- Standard operating procedures (SOPs)
- Disaster recovery policies and procedures
- Proprietary software documentation
- Tutorials
- Help menus
- PowerPoint and online software training materials
- User Specifications
- Test Scripts
- Glossaries
Industries served:
Software and technology companies
Government
Publishing
Financial Services
Healthcare/Pharma
Tools/software used, developed:
Depending on the industry and company, technical documentation maybe be hosted or distributed via a number of tools. I have included a list of tools and software I have used below:
- GitHub pages
- CRMs
- Internal repositories
- Confluence
- wikis
- Training systems
- MadCap Flare
- Success Center
- SharePoint